Elisabeth Moss Wins Lead Drama Actress Emmy For 'Handmaid's Tale'

Elisabeth Moss wins the Emmy for her role as Offred in Hulu's adaptation of 'The Handmaid's Tale.'Hulu

Elisabeth Moss won the Emmy Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series on Sunday night for her performance as Offred, or June Osborne, on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a series that garnered critical and popular attention--as well as 13 Emmy nominations--for its political relevance.

Moss beat out How to Get Away with Murder’s Viola Davis, The Crown’s Claire Foy, The Americans’ Keri Russell, Westworld’s Evan Rachel Wood and House of Cards’ Robin Wright. This was Moss’ seventh Emmy nomination, having earned six for her role as Mad Men’s Peggy Olson.

"Shows about women are what I like to watch and are, obviously, what audiences want to see," Moss said backstage after women her award.

On The Handmaid’s Tale, Moss plays the intense role of Offred, a sex servant and one of few fertile women left in an authoritarian and fundamentalist patriarchal society; she also served as a producer on the show. Her every facial expression and movement seems intentional, creating a truly harrowing performance from which the viewer cannot look away.

“Every scene was approached with an attitude of not holding back, no fear, no dumbing down or making it easier to watch,” Moss told The Hollywood Reporter.That was how we approached everything. That was extremely important to me before I signed on to the show. I wanted to make sure we were going go all the way.

Based on Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, the show deals with sexism and feminism to an extreme degree, and it resonated with audiences when it premiered in April, just a couple months after January's Women’s March organized people around the country to march for gender equality. With an extensive marketing campaign, the show embraced the idea of women leading a movement against the patriarchy.

And that “now” seems to be lasting: The show has already been renewed for a second season, which is set to premiere in 2018.

"You try to do your best and make something you're proud of, but you can never anticipate the way an audience, or a country, is going to react to it,” Moss told The Hollywood Reporter. “That extra level that it's gone as far as becoming a part of the conversation is something we couldn't have anticipated. And probably best that we didn't."

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